What Women Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Building a Thriving Business

Lesson #1 – Build relationships early, before you need them. 

For any leader, connections are a crucial pillar in a successful business. From start to finish, building bridges with your peers, industry leaders, and potential mentors will always be beneficial for you as an entrepreneur. The moral of the story is, no business leader succeeds alone. 

In the beginning, finding an industry mentor can start you on the right foot, gearing you in the right direction for progress. This person can also keep you afloat when you feel everything might be crashing down. An impactful mentor can help you navigate challenges you may not have even seen coming. They can also remind you that these obstacles often are stepping stones that end up strengthening your brand, as well as you as a leader. 

As your business grows, having connections within the industry can help with referrals, funding opportunities, or overall business outreach and growth. The connections you have made from the beginning may later become your future customers, clients, investors or even employees. 

Building connections throughout your businesses growth is all about building for the future. Although it might seem silly to think that in twenty years you might be looking for a new assistant manager or even someone to take your leadership position, it is the reality, and why not be prepared.

The network you cultivate over time as a business leader can open doors that no marketing campaign or business plan ever could.  

Lesson #2 – Don’t strive for perfection, progress outperforms perfection! 

This statement works for almost everything in life, those pushing through their fitness journeys, working on a school paper, or even successful entrepreneurs. For most entrepreneurs, they started long before they ‘felt ready.’ Whitney Wolfe Herd is a great example of someone who had never envisioned themselves as a founder. Wolfe Herd left the leadership team at Tinder and felt lost in the tech space. As a woman who has seen the ins and outs of dating apps she felt inspired to create a different approach to swiping, ultimately creating Bumble. Even in one of the most competitive markets, Wolfe Herd pursued her idea far before she felt completely ready and prepared. 

All of this to say, it is more than okay to feel unprepared, or to follow the ‘learn as you go’ mentatility. The funny thing about having a female-owned business, or being a woman in general, is we are always going to feel slightly unprepared. This isn’t biological, this is all based on how we grow up. 

Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, spoke on this exact topic in her TED Talk ‘Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection.’ An overall synopsis is said in this sentence, “We’re raising our girls to be perfect, and we’re raising our boys to be brave,’ Saujani said. She also highlighted how timid women often are when applying for jobs. If we don’t check every single requirement box, we simply don’t apply. Men on the other hand, feel over confident in application, reading maybe half of the requirements and feeling brave enough to apply. 

This transitions directly to female entrepreneurs. Sometimes you might not feel like you have enough connections, money saved, or even confidence, but if Wolfe Herd can teach us anything, do it anyway. 

Lesson #3 – Make Yourself a Customer Experience Expert 

Founder of Glossier, Emily Weiss proves this. Weiss spent years writing, reading and listening to the viewers of her beauty blog ‘Into The Gloss.’ This long lasting act of listening, leads to a huge customer base supporting a brand who listens and represents their needs and wants. While not every woman entrepreneur has the time to listen for years, investing energy into understanding your customer fanbase is crucial in creating a customer experience.

A successful female entrepreneur grows her business by listening and growing her customer experience. While understanding the customer is top priority, you must first understand your brand’s customer experience. Some questions to ask yourself are: What do you want your customer experience to look like? How do you want the customers to feel? What does customer loyalty look like for your business? So let's break that down.

What do you want your customer experience to look like? 

Do you want customers to walk in, be greeted, started in a fitting room, helped through the entirety of their in-store experience?

Does this experience look appointment based, ensuring each client/customer has a 1-on-1 employee experience? Is this an online customer experience, do you need to focus on easy layouts and accessible websites? All of these factors are huge in deciding your approach to a successful customer experience. 

Kendra Scott built her jewelry brand off of creating an engaging and community based in-store experience. She prioritized the experience over the product. She knew exactly how she wanted the Kendra Scott customer experience to feel, and she capitalized off of that. 

What does customer loyalty look like for your business? 

Are loyalty programs in the budget? Creating email chains, mail out flyers, and loyalty points all come top of mind when thinking of customer loyalty, but it can be so much more.

If your business is appointment based, it is more than likely that clients and customers will need to revisit regularly. Loyalty could simply be getting that next appointment scheduled before they leave your doors, ensuring they will be back with you again. 

The more loyalty customers have to your brand, the most ‘free’ marketing you can get, and who doesn’t want free marketing? Word-of-mouth marketing is often more impactful than any paid advertising.

Think about the last time you asked a friend where she got her hair done, her recommendation is going to mean much more than any Instagram ad flying through your feed. It’s a personal testimony happening in the real world that brings more positive attention to your business. And to sound like a broken record, positive word-of-mouth marketing, all stems from a positive customer experience. 

Lesson #4 – Lead with purpose, your purpose! 

When you decide your mission and purpose for your brand, lead with it. Sara Blakely is a great example of someone leading with their own personal purpose. Blakely built her company, Spanx, off of her own personal struggles, as well as the struggles of the women around her. She wanted to feel more confident and comfortable in their own skin, she took that passion and turned it into her purpose. 

As a business leader you know that your product or service needs to fill a current hole in the market. For Blakely, that passion built a business that made customers buy into something stronger than a product, a mission. 

When people buy into your mission they become loyal customers for life. As we talked about the importance of loyalty before, customer retention is everything.

Word-of-mouth marketing is one thing, having customers become strong advocates for your brand is another. Advocates are essentially free influencers for your brand. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for a micro influencer to talk about your brand, these customers feel so positive they go out of their way to talk positively online, to their friends, or even in the reviews section. 

Lesson #5 – Invest in your team, and your team will invest in you

As you begin to lead with purpose, you begin to create a team that feels just as passionately as you do. Encouraging this passionate work ultimately creates a higher energy work environment that shows for customers. Customers can tell when employees feel proud to work for an organization, and that all plays a role in the customer experience. 

Happy employees also means employee retention. Teams that stay with an organization for a while become personal experts on the product as well as a credible resource for customers. 

Employee retention can be hard even with a positive environment. The current market is all about ping-ponging from one job to another. This competition can be made simply by pay raises or benefits. Ultimately, as a leader it is your responsibility to keep your employees engaged and motivated to stay with the company. Having a strong mission that your employees are passionate about helps, but implicating incentive programs, employee career growth, and overall their long term success with strengthen their connections to the brand. 

I love to use Oprah Winfrey as an example. She was able to create an entire media network that grew into something bigger than a single product, or even just her. Winfrey built a business that can and does run completely independently from her as a founder. Using a combination of a strong team, operational systems, and multiple revenue streams create a network that can be recognized as easily as saying ‘Oprah.’ 

Final Thoughts 

Walking through the journeys of successful female entrepreneurs shows us one clear message, business success is not built simply by chance. Jessica Alba showed us the importance of leading with a strong purpose. Whitney Wolfe Herd emphasized that women are built for risk. We learned to prioritize customer relationships from Emily Weiss, and Oprah Winfrey is the prime example of a successful team leading to a successful network. 

These are only a few of the powerful female business leaders who are changing the misconception that entrepreneurs must have all of the answers before they begin. By following these tips you not only have the potential to grow a profitable business, but a business with value, and as a female-founded business, value always trumps profit. 

So whether you are trying to take your business to the next level, looking to purchase your first business, or even preparing for a successful exit, these wonderful women have offered a roadmap for building something that can withstand anything. 

Taylor Kaufmann is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison now pursuing her MBA with a focus on Strategic Marketing Communications. Her studies center around public relations, brand marketing, and digital media strategy, complemented by extensive experience in the retail sector.